“It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in
uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal
or immoral.” General Peter Pace, Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Press Club, February
17, 2006.

“They will be held accountable for the decisions
they make. So they should in fact not obey the
illegal and immoral orders to use weapons of mass
destruction.” General Peter Pace, CNN With Wolf
Blitzer, April 6, 2003

06/19/07 "ICH" -- - The surprise decision by the
Bush regime to replace General Peter Pace as
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been
explained as a necessary step to avoid contentious
confirmation hearings in the US Senate. Gen. Pace’s
reappointment would have to be confirmed, and as the
general has served as vice chairman and chairman of
the Joint Chiefs for the past 6 years, the
Republicans feared that hearings would give war
critics an opportunity to focus, in Defense
Secretary Gates words, “on the past, rather than the
future.”

This is a plausible explanation. Whether one takes
it on face value depends on how much trust one still
has in a regime that has consistently lied about
everything for six years.

General Pace himself says he was forced out when he
refused to “take the issue off the table” by
voluntarily retiring. Pace himself was sufficiently
disturbed by his removal to strain his relations
with the powers that be by not going quietly.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page interpreted
Pace’s removal as indication that “the man running
the Pentagon is Democratic Senator Carl Levin of
Michigan. For that matter, is George W. Bush still
President?”

The Wall Street Journal editorial writers’ attempt
to portray Pace’s departure as evidence of a weak
and appeasing administration does not ring true. An
administration that escalates the war in Iraq in the
face of public opposition and pushes ahead with its
plan to attack Iran is not an appeasing
administration. Whether it is the war or Attorney
General Gonzales or the immigration bill or anything
else, President Bush and his Republican stalwarts
have told Congress and the American people that they
don’t care what Congress and the public think.
Bush’s signing statements make it clear that he
doesn’t even care about the laws that Congress
writes.

A president audacious enough to continue an
unpopular and pointless war in the face of public
opinion and a lost election is a president who is
not too frightened to reappoint a general. Why does
Bush run from General Pace when he fervently
supports embattled Attorney General Gonzales? What
troops does Bush support? He supports his toadies.

There are, of course, other explanations for General
Pace’s departure. The most disturbing of these
explanations can be found in General Pace’s two
statements at the beginning of this article.

In the first statement General Pace says that every
member of the US military has the absolute
responsibility to disobey illegal and immoral
orders. In the second statement, General Pace says
that an order to use weapons of mass destruction is
an illegal and immoral order.

The context of General Pace’s second statement above
(actually, the first statement in historical time)
is his response to Blitzer’s question whether the
invading US troops could be attacked with Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction. But Pace’s answer does
not restrict illegal and immoral only to Iraqi use
of WMD. It is a general statement. It applies to
their use period.

On March 10, 2006, Jorge Hirsch (http://www.antiwar.com/hirsch/?articleid=8678)
made a case that use of nuclear weapons is both
illegal and immoral. Despite the illegality and
immorality of first-use of nuclear weapons, the Bush
Pentagon rewrote US war doctrine to permit their use
regardless of their illegality and immorality. For a
regime that not only believes that might is right
abut also that they have the might, law is what the
regime says.

The revised war doctrine permits US first strike use
of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries. We
need to ask ourselves why the Bush administration
would blacken America’s reputation and rekindle the
nuclear arms race unless the administration had
plans to apply its new war doctrine.

Senator Joseph Lieberman, a number of
neoconservatives, prominent Jewish leaders such as
Norman Podhoretz, and members of the Israeli
government have called for a US attack on Iran. Most
Republican presidential candidates have said that
they would not rule out the use of nuclear weapons
against Iran.

Allegedly, the US Department of State is pursuing
diplomacy with Iran, not war, but Undersecretary of
State Nicholas Burns gives the lie to that claim. On
June 12 Burns claimed that Iran was not only arming
insurgents in Iraq but also the Taliban in
Afghanistan. Burns’ claims are, to put it mildly,
controversial in the US intelligence community, and
they are denied not only by Iran but also by our
puppet government in Afghanistan. On June 14, Afghan
Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak told the
Associated Press that Burns’ claim has no
credibility.

But, of course, none of the administration’s
propagandistic claims that set the stage for the
invasion of Iraq had any credibility either, and the
lack of credibility did not prevent the claims from
deceiving the Congress and the American people. As
the US media now functions as the administration’s
Ministry of Propaganda, the Bush regime believes
that it can stampede Americans with lies into
another war.

The Bush regime has concluded that a conventional
attack on Iran would do no more than stir up a
hornet’s nest and release retaliatory actions that
the US could not manage. The Bush regime is
convinced that only nuclear weapons can bring the
mullahs to heel.

The Bush regime’s plan to attack Iran with nuclear
weapons puts General Pace’s departure in a different
light. How can President Bush succeed with an order
to attack with nuclear weapons when America’s
highest ranking military officer says that such an
order is “illegal and immoral” and that everyone in
the military has an “absolute responsibility” to
disobey it?

An alternative explanation for Pace’s departure is
that Pace had to go so that malleable toadies can be
installed in his place.

Pace’s departure removes a known obstacle to a
nuclear attack on Iran, thus advancing that possible
course of action. A plan to attack Iran with nuclear
weapons might also explain the otherwise
inexplicable “National Security and Homeland
Security Presidential Directive” (NSPD-51 AND
HSPD-20) that Bush issued on May 9. Bush’s directive
allows him to declare a “national emergency” on his
authority alone without ratification by Congress.
Once Bush declares a national emergency, he can take
over all functions of government at every level, as
well as private organizations and businesses, and
remain in total control until he declares the
emergency to be over.

Who among us would trust Bush, or any president,
with this power?

What is the necessity of such a sweeping directive
subject to no check or ratification?

What catastrophic emergency short of a massive
attack on the US with nuclear ICBMs can possibly
justify such a directive?

There is no obvious answer to the question. The
federal government’s inability to respond to
Hurricane Katrina is hard evidence that centralizing
power in one office is not the way to deal with
catastrophes.

A speculative answer is that, with appropriate
propaganda, the directive could be triggered by a US
nuclear attack on Iran. The use of nuclear weapons
arouses the ultimate fear. A US nuclear attack would
send Russian and Chinese ICBMs into high alert.
False flag operations could be staged in the US. The
propagandistic US media would hype such developments
to the hilt, portraying danger everywhere. Fear of
the regime’s new detention centers would silence
most voices of protest as the regime declares its
“national emergency.”

This might sound like a far-out fiction novel, but
it is a scenario that would explain the Bush
regime’s disinterest in the shrinking Republican
vote that foretells a massive Republican wipeout in
the 2008 election. In a declared national emergency,
there would be no election.

As implausible as this might sound to people who
trust the government, be aware that despite his
rhetoric, Bush has no respect for democracy. His
neoconservative advisors have all been taught that
it is their duty to circumvent democracy, as
democracy does not produce the right decisions.
Neoconservatives believe in rule by elites, and they
regard themselves as the elite. The Bush regime
decided that Americans would not agree to an
invasion of Iraq unless they were deceived and
tricked into it, and so we were.

Indeed, democracy is out of favor throughout the
Western world. In the UK and Europe, peoples are
being forced, despite their expressed opposition,
into an EU identity that they reject. British PM
Tony Blair and his European counterparts have
decided on their own that the people do not know
best and that the people will be ignored. As former
French PM Valery Giscard d’Estaing told the French
newspaper, Le Monde, “Public opinion will be led to
adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we
dare not present to them directly.” Giscard
d’Estaing is referring to the resurrection of the
rejected EU constitution camouflaged as a treaty.
Giscard d’Estaing acknowledges that 450 million
Europeans are being hoodwinked. Why should Americans
be surprised that they have been and are being
hoodwinked?

Americans might have more awareness of their peril
if they realized that their leaders no longer
believe in democratic outcomes.

Dr. Roberts is an economist who has held numerous
university appointments and served as Assistant
Secretary of the US Treasury.

===
"If the people are not convinced (that the Free
World is in mortal danger) it would be impossible
for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent
to avert danger. With the support of public opinion,
as marshalled by the press, we are off to a good
start. It is our Job - yours and mine -- to keep our
people convinced that the only way to keep disaster
away from our shores is to build up America's
might." -- Charles Wilson, Chairman of the Board of
General Electric and Truman appointee to head the
Office of Defence Mobilization, in a speech to the
Newspaper Publishers Association, 1950